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A Photo of a Smell and Other Scoops

Kindly fly to London right away, said the message relayed from Harold Evans, editor in chief. Get yourself to Savile Row, and have the best suit possible made for you there by the most notable tailor. Take the suit back to have it copied where you live, in Hong Kong. Bring both suits (labels snipped out) to New York, to be assessed by an expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology. We’ll publish the result.

It was a welcome boon for a hungry freelancer, and naturally I did as bidden.

The project was a classic Harry Evans stunt, of a kind told many times over (though not included) in “My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times,” his intriguing yet lopsided memoir of a life in the fast-vanishing world of ink-and-paper journalism. That he at the time was no longer editing a great British national newspaper but rather Condé Nast Traveler, a grand-luxe American monthly, meant little alteration to his motivating credo.

As he writes here of his many earlier newspaper campaigns, Mr. Evans saw the governing function of journalism — whether Linotyped onto recycled newsprint or offset onto the glossiest stock — just as it had been laid down a century before by his great campaigning editor-hero, W. T. Stead. This Victorian liberal figure, who died on the Titanic, believed firmly that the press should have what he called “its Argus-eyed power of inspection” preside over all the doings of humanity. And to Mr. Evans, whether those eyes were brought to bear on the corruption of a faraway tyrant, the dishonesty of a giant corporation or the indifferent quality of a vicuña topcoat made little essential difference.

Most of the tale takes place in Britain, where Mr. Evans’s relentlessly inventive journalism has won him lasting and near-legendary status. Fewer than 40 of this long book’s later pages are devoted to his more recent and more internationally celebrated years, where he has burrowed with teredo-like tenacity into the fabric of the New York literary establishment, with stints editing a news magazine, running the publisher Random House and producing many tombstone-size volumes.

But this lopsidedness has made the resulting autobiography, stripped of any temptation to offer up a cavalcade of Manhattan society figures, so much better than it might have been (for there is quite a tedious abundance of names dropped in those final 38 pages). Not only is it a loving homage to the joys of old-fashioned British newspapering, but it has also allowed Mr. Evans to tell at proper length stories that should now be taught as classics in journalism schools worldwide — such as, to choose one that did much for his career, the infamous case of the Teesside Smell.

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In this instance Mr. Evans spotted the potential for a good story after he arrived at his first job as an editor — of W. T. Stead’s old daily broadsheet, The Northern Echo, which had its headquarters in the old railway-birthplace-town of Darlington, 300 miles north of London. He became aware of an occasional disagreeable rankness to the local air, and it troubled him.

His olfactory epiphany came on “a perfect spring day” when Mr. Evans, with his young family, was taking his ease in a pretty village on the Yorkshire moors nearby. Suddenly the visitors were enveloped in a foul mist, a miasma reeking of stinking fish, and worse. They were shocked.

Back in town, everyone said they knew of it, but owned that it was merely an inevitable consequence of local industry — and no bad thing either, since as Yorkshire-speak has it, “where there’s muck, there’s brass.”

But Mr. Evans thought the smell a damaging nuisance and suspected a leak of chemicals from a particular local plant. When the firm’s PR men issued a smoothly unconvincing denial, he decided on a characteristically imaginative means of disproving it: he commissioned a photographer to take a picture of the smell-carrying haze, and then ran two images — one of crystal-clean and untainted air in a neighboring village, the other of a blanket of foully aromatic and very visible smog oozing from the plant — side-by-side, on the front page.

The managers, busted, could do naught but readily admit the leak, and fix the problem. And Mr. Evans, imbued with a larky confidence that has never since left him, was all of a sudden a local hero well on his way to British national newspaper stardom.

I remember only too well the punishing adroitness with which he ran The Echo. My own first newspaper job was on The Journal in Newcastle, 40 miles to Darlington’s north. Day after miserable day, or so it seemed, we were routinely and humiliatingly scooped by this manically energetic, devil-may-care Mancunian railway engineer’s son, who managed to gather around him a stellar corps d’élite of reporters and photographers, and give them ideas for articles with which they promptly ran rings around us.

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Harold Evans bidding goodbye to his staff at The Sunday Times of London in 1981.Credit
Mark Ellidge

To compound the loathing personally, I was sent to take shorthand lessons in Darlington itself, with the classes held in a building right next door to Mr. Evans’s imposing Victorian offices: I swore at the time I would have readily let the air out of his tires if I thought it would do any good for those of us working up on The Journal.

With experiences like this under his belt, Mr. Evans was soon to be noticed by the great and the good in London, and before long he was handed the plum job of editing The Sunday Times, a newspaper owned in kindly and tolerant manner by the Canadian millionaire Roy Thomson. The sagas over which Mr. Evans then presided — campaigns for justice for the victims of the sedative thalidomide; the exposing of Kim Philby, Britain’s former anti-Soviet spy boss, as a Soviet spy himself; searing details of the terrors of Idi Amin and of the butcheries in Bangladesh — have long since passed into the canon of press lore.

Mr. Evans tells these stories well — on occasion with rather more detail than American readers might care for — but displaying all the while the rambunctious, anti-establishment, North Country willfulness for which Britain still fondly remembers him.

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That he went to America in the 1980s, after Rupert Murdoch bought the Times papers and fired him, is still seen by some in Britain as a betrayal; and that he has appeared to have done so well here has rather compounded the feeling. But if Mr. Evans has been in any way affected by such mutterings, he is cheerfully not saying.

And besides, in 2004 the Queen gave him a knighthood, which suggests that, officially at least, he is thought back home to be a thoroughly good egg, someone who as the rubric of the knightly accolade has it, “is deemed to have brought honour and glory to his country.”

And the suits? The Condé Nast Traveler official verdict, splashed across the magazine, held that the Savile Row suit — which was fashioned by the tailor to Prince Charles — was vastly inferior to the Hong Kong knockoff. The article caused a brief sensation: the tailor is no longer on Savile Row, and the Prince shops elsewhere. And thus was chalked up another small victory, both for the Argus-eyed press and for this most irrepressible of its champions.

MY PAPER CHASE

True Stories of Vanished Times

By Harold Evans

580 pages. Little, Brown & Company. Illustrated. $27.99.

Simon Winchester has just completed writing “Atlantic: A Biography of the Ocean.”

A version of this review appears in print on December 22, 2009, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Photo of a Smell And Other Scoops. Today's Paper|Subscribe